featured book

Featured Author

Juan Gabriel Vasquezbooks include the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin award winner and national bestseller, The Sound of Things Falling, as well as the award-winning The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana.

featured book

featured book

The Gangster of Love

Format

Paperback

Price

$16.00

Paperback

ISBN 9780140159707

320 Pages

1 Oct 1997

Penguin Books

Adult

Overview

? Nominated for The Irish Times International Fiction Prize? The author?s first novel, Dogeaters, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1990 and was voted the best book of the year by the Before Columbus Foundation.Rocky Rivera arrives in the U.S. from the Philippines the day that Jimi Hendrix dies. So begins a blazing coming-of-age story suffused with the tensions of immigration which finds Rocky moving from the counter-culture in 1960s San Francisco to the extravagant music scene in Manhattan of the 1980s.The Gangster of Love tells the story of the Rivera family as they make their new life in the States?all the while haunted by the memory of the father and the homeland they left behind. Among its members are Rocky?s haughty mother, who has impulsively left her father; Voltaire, her brother, prone to heavy depression and odd friendships with strangers; and Rocky herself, unsure about sex and worshipful of her boyfriend?the guitar-playing Elvis Chang?who must learn to accept reality amidst the myths and lures of American success and idolatry.